Data Monday: The Voracious Mobile Consumer

When it comes to wireless network and mobile use, not all users are created equal. A small but growing percentage of people are gobbling up huge quantities of network traffic and the devices they use make a big difference in how much data they consume.

1% of bandwidth consumers account for half of all wireless traffic worldwide in the World. The top 10% of users are consuming 90% of wireless bandwidth. (source)

64 percent of these users are using a laptop, a third using a smartphone and 3% an iPad. (source)

In 2009, the top 3% of heavy users generated 40% of wireless network traffic. Now, these users account for 70% of the traffic. (source)

The heaviest users of mobile data watched videos 40% of the time, surfed the Web an additional 20%, and used up the rest of their online time in e-mails, social networking, file sharing and software downloads. (source)

13.2% of the world’s 6.1 billion cellphones are smartphones, but the rate exceeds 30% in larger markets like the United States, Germany and Britain. In countries like Sweden and Finland, smartphones now account for more than half of all mobile phones. (source)

Finns consume on average 1 gigabyte of wireless data a month over an operator’s network, almost 10 times the European average. As more consumers buy smartphones, the level of mobile data consumption and congestion will rise in other countries. (source)

Median smartphone data usage at AT&T was up 888% and up 551% at Verizon this past year. (source)

Voice recognition software Siri has prompted owners of the iPhone 4S to use almost twice as much data as iPhone 4 users. (source)

An average user of Research In Motion's latest BlackBerries (Curve and Bold Touch), downloads about 20% of the data of an iPhone 4S user. (source)

Low-end data users are catching up rapidly with the higher-end users. (source)